I've been suspecting this for awhile and it seems to ring true. Facebook made some changes this year and it's noticeable. If you add a new friend, like, interest, group, whatever, notice that EVERYTHING they do shows up on your wall for like, a week.

If you do not comment, like, or otherwise engage with that page, the posts will not show up on your wall after that point. If you go to the page and click or enter anything there, you will see more of their posts on your feed.

I still feel like they put this system in place in combination with the promoted page option because together it solves a lot of problems for them. Cuts down on spam (and indirectly support requests and the need for support techs which is a profit increase), gives the end user more relevant stuff on their wall as long as they are interacting, and makes them money via promotion. It's like a win win win win win situation for FB, other than the fallout from people not seeing stuff they want to see on their feed and not knowing if they are missing things they might want to receive in their feed.

Thu Nov 08, 2012 10:51 am

anomalyLoserface

Joined: 22 May 2008
Posts: 2648
Location: DFW, TX

I love this pic

Thu Nov 08, 2012 12:42 pm

futuristxen

Joined: 01 Jul 2002
Posts: 19377
Location: Tighten Your Bible Belt

Facebook will be completely irrellevent in like two years. It's going the way of napster and myspace.

Twitter largely does the things that people want their facebook to do, but much faster.

Remember when people chatted in IM? Remember when people wrote emails? Remember discussion threads?

Warren Ellis wrote about this this past week:

Quote:

Google+ is apparently a success, according to many tech reporters. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most people are using G+ to post inside Circles. Some 11,000 people have added me to G+ circles – but, apparently, none of the ones they post to. Of the 150+ people I had in circles, precisely three of them posted content I could see. When I posted content, only a thin fraction of those 11000 people could see it, because at some point I got tuned out by the system. G+ is therefore useless to me, and I just nuked my circles.

Facebook Pages allow some 16% of the people who clicked Like on a Page to see the posts from that Page. Regardless of whether or not those people specifically requested those posts in their News Feed. If a Page owner wants to access the eyeballs of more of the people who clicked Like on a Page because they wanted to see that Page’s posts, that Page owner has to pay to Promote those posts. I would currently have to pay USD $10 to ensure that all the people who Liked the official Warren Ellis Page on Facebook actually saw one single post. Facebook Pages are therefore useless to me.

(Of the 150+ people I had as Friends on my personal page, maybe five people were aware I was actually there, so I’ve nuked my friends list there, too.)

None of this is important, you understand. But I’ve not been paying a huge amount of attention to social media this year. Until it became time to start thinking about raising awareness of GUN MACHINE. So I’ve had to dig into this a bit – I’ve been talking about this in the newsletter, too.

Facebook, in search of monetisation, has killed engagement – unless your brand is so big that you are in fact desperate to pay for connection. Because small brands like me can move around, but big brands have to be seen in the big places. The Facebook Page is now completely broken unless you open your wallet.

And who the fuck even knows how Google+ works now. It is, in its way, the most “service-y” of the social network sites – now the dust has settled, it really seems to be a souped-up version of Google Groups, with built-in discovery and significant tech enhancements like Hangouts. A service, not a network.

None of this is important, but it is interesting to me.

Facebook will have to rely on big companies for one of its revenue streams, driving the small-fry like me out of the Pages system and possibly off Facebook entirely. People like me will probably keep a FB account alive, though, and maybe even use it to log into things, thereby sending data back that they can sell in another revenue stream. FB won’t care that I’m not running a Page. In theory, by usurping the “single sign-on” role that things like OAuth were supposed to fill, Facebook gets data to sell without even having to run a social network.

Google doubtless gathers enough data about me in other ways that my non-use of G+ won’t matter a whit. They felt that they had to have a social network, but they are not a social network company, and don’t need to run a social network in order to do their business.

Perhaps you could add “the death of the social network” to “the death of blogging” in the media-headline scare list. Replace it with pervasive digital loyalty, maybe.

Whatever it is, it’s no bloody use for hearing from people, or talking to a crowd.